Perfect Service

Perfect service,
and the brush of a stranger's hair
on your arm.
And wanting to write like Hemmingway.
And wanting to write like Joni Mitchell.
And wanting to paint as if their words have stumbled somehow
from exhausted presses,
whose letters no longer say
but only mean,
to the biggest empty page that they could find.

Wanting to paint as if you have
forever to understand these words
not scrawled across the canvas
but embedded on,
embossed upon
its surface. Wait forever
for the perfect sleepless night to take you
out of skin and meaning
of the darker sky and room,
the bed too warm,
too wide.

Wade
across the stillness
of a house with no one in it
save for Ludo, and he's sleeping
to a painting full of circles
looking forward to the spring.

Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

Twisted Conversations

Fragments of aching loneliness echoing down the hall,
when the only one who can comfort me is the one who won't,
when the song is right but I can't,
and my voice is clutted with words I'm forbidden to speak,
and my limbs are crippled with places forbidden to lie.

His voice down the vacuous hall
is calling,
and he wants an answer,
and I have dozens,
mais aucun n'est l'un qu'il veut.
Old story.

'Are you okay?'
It's alright, I'm only singeing
and the noise is only burning
from your voice acrosss the yawning
chasm deep into my throat
where words float, encumbered, in potentia,
and I'm sinking into sleep.

I'm not sinking, only drowning,
lying face down on the sheets
my mother gave me. She embroidered
tiny flowers on the pillows.
This quilt my parents' wedding spread,
frame my father built
from rescued parts. It's not enough.
These close familial charms
will not protect me when his arms
are all that can keep the wolves of his words away.

I need an apotrope.

Green Medusa in the no-man's land
of the middle rooms, the only rooms
where we can meet.
In all others I search for you and am lost.

In yours I am a child.
In mine, an exile.

Ludo, my Insomnia

Have you met Ludo?
Inexorable, and therefore made at home,
I'll never be alone
at night, eyes open wide,
with Ludo by.
Dreaming of a home I'll never find,
of arms not mine, Ludo laughs,
and forgives me my follies.
Yet Ludo forbids me my night's errant pathways:
"Save them for the day,
don't think of it 'til day."

Ludo, I have carried you
from one room to another in this house,
and then another, until you know the place
almost as well as I. Please try
not to hold this against him.
But after all,
who know better than you the turning routes my unconscious takes
when it's past the end of yesterday,
and tomorrow is too far off? No wonder
that I drag you from room to room for hours on end.

Ludo, my insomnia.

Her Eyes

Her red hair against the green,
her red-amber eyes from the shadow of the porch
watch all,
are seen in return,
don't mind.

She raises cups of strong sweet coffee to her lips,
sets them down again on blue and white saucers.
Drinks to hide her thoughts,
the smile and scowls that chase across her lips
on the very edge of St. Joseph.

Her pale winter skin,
white hands,
flaxen forehead, eyes of silk
left too long out in the sun.
Her stilled voice,
sighing now but what she
says you can't understand.
Her ancient forest voice,
the rustlings of sap, brambles reach,
and every tree is woken.

Ceilings

Late morning Saturday,
late February,
late winter in the month
before rejuvination, motion
to the new old house, seeking
always to be home, to come to this nest of pillows,
music soothing from your cavern to the south.

A creature of the north, I adore
this house.
The ceilings call me,
after many nights of gazing
in the gloam of early morning
at their ragged, crannied skins.

Napping and Dreams

Napping
February 21, 2010
5'' x 8''
Pencil, coloured pencil on paper

i/
Dreams

of reading together, glorious uprooted passages

purring through the cave of your belly to my ear,

through the cavern of my larynx to your fingers on my throat. Know what matters.

Know that the pattern,

the precise colour of late-afternoon sunlight from the south,
pollen-yellow,

faintly apricot,

I will not say gold,

is so much more essential.

ii/

Know these things,

and why I want to live here.

Know the purpose of a canvas on the floor.

Know that doors opening inward

only beckon. Know that

the ladder on a balcony only ever leads up,

while the mountain only ever leads down.

Know which streets call us away,

and which ones bring us home,

and which chords are always warm,

and which words heal me.

iii/

Know the reasons I sit up late

in the front room, barely rocking,

watching early-rising walkers on the street,

with a paintbrush in my hand.

Know the textures of the floor against your back,

against my thighs, sitting childishly,

while everything important

hangs in the air between us.

Everthing important,

in the ocher coloured air.

iv/

Dreams, sienna dreams

of henna tinted home. Words flow.

And in the early morning, have I woken?

Have I slept?

Does it matter? Mist is fading.

On the street, the early walkers

hurry out against the thinness of the day,

but you won't rise for hours:

'Below the thunders of the upper deep . . .

The Kraken sleepeth.'*

And so, until the end of days,

or else this afternoon,

which I would argue is even farther off,

the sun and I are lovers without you.

v/
A room for dreaming outward,

and one for dreaming in,

and all the other moments of our house, in the spaces in between.

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'The Kraken,' in Tennyson (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 42.

Far Poles

Melancholy at canvas at two in the morning, will I hope desperately in vain for the creak of floorboards from the far end of the house?

i)
There is no greater distance than between the far poles of our house,
I spinning at one,
while at the other you turn in your sleep, unaware,
every drip of pale tinted water a prayer
(if you can believe I'd believe in prayer).

By the time each makes its way undeniably down the canvas
I've lost you all over again.
Calling is to lose you.
How not to want you?

ii)
Is this how we'll be in the spring,
me sitting spinning at my canvas while the earth slowly turns you
irrevocably away
toward morning,
the time of unravelling?
With each day passing, dawn comes sooner.
One morning it will break before me,
before I can make my journey
across the floor,
through the night into sleep.
One day dawn will find me still weaving
spells among my circles.
Will I be turned into stone?

iii)
Knowing you near me is no consolation
when the distance to be crossed
between your door
and I on the floor
is as great as between the earth's far poles.